How to Create a Community on Google+

If you haven’t heard, Google+ has a new feature: communities. They’re much like groups on Facebook and can be public or private. Communities are a great way to bring a group of family or friends together, but can also be used for teams or to bring people together with a common interest.

Best of all, you can do everything in your community that you can do on Google+: share links, photos and videos; create and plan events; and even talk face-to-face using hangouts. The Googe+ mobile app has also been updated so that you can keep up with your communities and post while on-the-go.

So now, let’s take a look at how to create a community on Google+.

1. Go to the Google+ home page and click on Communities in the left navigation sidebar.

2. Click on the “Create a Community” button at the top right of the page.

3. Decide whether you want a Public or Private community; public communities can be seen by anyone in the world, while private communities are only accessible by its members.

4. Once you click on Public or Private, you’ll need to enter a name for your Community and decide whether to hide your community from searches.

5. “Congratulations, you’ve started a community,” is the message that you should see displayed on the next page. Now you can customize it further with a tagline, photo, description, guidelines, and categories.

6. Once you click on the “Done editing” button, you’ll be prompted to invite people to your community. You can invite people individually, invite an entire circle, or even make your invitation public.

7. Now you’ll be able to add new posts and events, edit your community, invite members, and start hangouts whenever you want; everything is pretty straightforward.

8. By default notifications for your community will be on, but you can turn them off if you don’t want to be notified of new posts and activity.

That’s it. If you happen to have a public Google+ community feel free to share it in the comments.